So I browsed Afesta today and stumbled upon a video that seemed a little familiar.
It’s this video Making it Up to You - Amazing Busty Teen in Ultra High Definition VR , but not really. You see, this video is on their official website. It features Melody Marks, which is also doing a lot of JAV. This video has a good script and can either be viewed by purchasing it or subscribing to SLR.
Now this is all okay and nothing problematic, but today I stumbled upon this:
It is the same video as the other ones, costs 1480 JPY (~9,40€)
and has only 24 minutes instead of the 48 minutes. Also they used generative AI on this video to give it a different style. Well they advertise it with a higher quality, but the original video already has good quality and costs $6,99 (~989,94 JPY / ~6,30€)
Now I wouldn’t really care too much if it wasn’t SLR trying to sell a video with less content overprized, after they used AI on it. The video practically has half the length and costs more.
I generally like AI, so it really annoys me that a big company scams people with it. If they would have released it at a smaller price than the original, just because it was a fun thing to try out, sure why not? But actually asking more for it, makes AI and them look bad. Because they try to justify this price with this small style change, while cutting on the content.
So what do you think? Is SLR scamming people or is this content price ratio justified?
Would you want to see them do this on their official website instead of creating new high quality content?
This is in no way a scam. The generative AI to give her an animated appearance is definitely something that could be interesting to an entirely new and different audience, or even the same audience over again. I could see it catching on in Japan especially.
Given that all the positions seem to be present from the previews (so they’re not splitting it up to sell in multiple parts), I’m guessing the shorter length is due to cutting portions where the AI effect didn’t work very well.
Ultimately, they are upfront about the product they are offering (it acknowledges it’s a remake using AI in the description), and the price they are offering it at. If people are willing to pay it, that’s up to them. If they’re not, I’m guessing they’ll revisit their pricing.
The only thing slightly off-putting about it is if the model isn’t compensated for the second picture in any way. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case, since I’m guessing Melody was just paid once for the original work and signed all rights away in the process. But that’s just symptomatic of a larger issue between the porn industry and actresses. It’s still above-board legally and in terms of being up-front with all parties about the deal involved.
And I do agree that it could be an interesting thing to experience, but you are saying that even though they cut the content to 24 minutes, and the only real change is the AI style, would definitely justify selling it for a higher price than the original. Just by looking at the preview pictures you can see, that they didn’t do anything to fix obvious AI mistakes, which makes the output more or less low effort.
Everone has their own view on things and if you think that their work justifies charging more than the original, then that’s completely okay. But it would be good if you don’t spread false information, about their description, since they don’t mention how they achieved the anime style remake, they only mention the usage of AI for the mosaic.
Fair point that they don’t mention AI is used for the remake process, though frankly I don’t think that’s really the important part; it doesn’t matter how the sausage is made so much as the result, which they show in the screenshots. The important part is that it’s an old scene remade in a new style and not a new scene, which they do acknowledge. I could understand being angry purchasing this if you didn’t realize it was just a new take on a scene you already owned, but not if you watched the scene, enjoyed it, and then a month later realized it was made using an AI model and got upset about that.
However, I really don’t think anything about it justifying the price one way or another, because that’s not really an issue. The thing you keep running into is this idea that pricing schemes have to be justified in some way. They do not. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy anything. If they wanted to charge $1,000 for this scene, that would not be a scam. Maybe something to point and laugh at, but still, just a bad pricing scheme.
Deforum using an SD 1.5 model with a low denoising coefficient to get that rotoscoped effect. You could do it yourself without a lot of difficulty. Same technique used to make all those tiktok dancing videos look like anime.
I do get that they have every right to put any price they want on it, but what bothers me is that we already know how much the original video with full content costs, and they put a higher price on the cut version with the only difference being their low effort AI generated anime style. This is me not being anti AI, but me not liking the fact that they didn’t put a lot of effort into this and sell it for a higher price and no not everything done with AI is low effort, but since I work a lot with AI image generation, I know that what they did there, is low effort. Everyone with access to AI can recreate this without problems and they are selling it, like it’s worth more than the original.
I made a video like this last year, segmented so that only the actress changed as she morphed ethnicity and nationality. It was imperfect, but editing out the hallucination glitches like arbitrary weird jewelry, tattoos, and hairpins made it look a lot fancier than it actually was. It was a bit like a low budget porn version of Michael Jackson’s Black and White video.